1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for verifying the operation of a target system, and more specifically, it relates to a system and method for observing and verifying the operation of a target system to be inspected while determining a variety of inspection conditions, and computer readable article of manufacture to implement the method of the present invention.
2. Description of the Related Art
Inspecting the operation of a real-time system, which requires processing in real time, or an embedded system, embedded in various types of devices, requires observation of the behavior of the system by actually executing software using an evaluation board or hardware of an actual device. Observation of the behavior of the system is carried out by a probe added to hardware and software. Due to the real-time nature of this type of system's operation, it is desirable that the effects (intrusion) of observation by a probe and the processing of obtained data on the system's operation performance be minimized.
One known example of this kind of technique is BlackBox Technology from the Swedish company ZealCore. See Henrik Thane, Daniel Sundmark, “Debugging Using Time Machines: Replay Your Embedded System's History”, Real-Time & Embedded Computing Conference, p Kap 22, Milan, Italy, November, 2001. This known technique is one by which a system's operation is recorded and the recorded operation is reproduced. This technique aims to use a record of the system's operation recorded until a crash in order to determine the cause of the crash when the system crashes. This technique observes system behavior using probe code embedded in the system in conjunction with a code generation technique. The CPU time required for observation and processing by probe code is reduced relative to the entire computation time provided by the processor of the system. See Hans Hansson, “RTS Debugging”, MALARDALEN REAL-TIME RESEARCH CENTRE, 2003, searched on Oct. 11, 2007, on the Internet at http://www.artes.uu.se/industry/031111/debugginq-ZC-031111.pdf. Although the amount of information of the system's operation in itself is enormous, the amount of information actually recorded can fall within a practical range by recording only information sufficient for reproduction of the operation.
As described above, inspecting the operation of a real-time system or an embedded system requires actually operating the system to be inspected and observing the behavior of the system. Intrusion of the observation and processing of obtained data is preferably small.
Debugging a target system requires inspection of the target system's operation, including various items, such as, verification of a functional specification and sufficiency of performance requirements. Necessary information varies depending on what kind of inspection is conducted. Accordingly, observation for general purpose use is inefficient and it is difficult to reduce intrusion.
In ZealCore's BlackBox technique, operation of a system to be inspected is observed and the information is recorded. However, the recording is aimed at determining the cause of a system crash so it does not support many other events required for debugging a system.